Trans-Sister Radio

  I watched her drain the last of her wine. "I shouldn't have another glass," she said, "but I think I will."

  "I have that effect on people," I said, and I motioned for our waiter to return.

  When we were waiting for our check after dinner--long after we'd finally given in and ordered and finished a bottle of wine--Allison reached across the table for my hands and wrapped her fingers around mine.

  "What will it look like?" she asked, the worrisome urgency of a mother in her voice. Honey, do you really think a tattoo's a good idea? Do you really think you should dye your hair purple? Maybe you'd like to talk to someone about this self-mutilation thing?

  Of course I knew exactly what she meant. I'd asked it myself of doctors in three states and in Montreal. And each time I'd used that very same word. It.

  What will it look like?

  Each surgeon had known instantly what I was talking about.

  "Will it look like ... any other woman's?" Allison asked when I didn't answer right away.

  I shrugged and then repeated what the surgeon I had chosen in Colorado had told me. "It will look exactly like what it's supposed to look like," I said, and then added what he'd said to reassure me. "Apparently, it will fool anyone but a gynecologist ... and even gynecologists, at first, will assume it belongs to a g.g."

  "G.g.?"

  "Genetic girl."

  We had both had way too much to drink, but with the little reason that remained we agreed it was inadvisable for her to try to drive back to Bartlett. We decided instead we would leave her car in the parking lot of the restaurant, and she would spend the night in my apartment in Burlington.

  There, at her urging, I showed her my special closet with my secret wardrobe, and then we made love on the bed. The next morning, I knew, we'd regret both decisions. But it was late and we were drunk, and we were just two chicks having the best time in fantasy land.

  Our next three dates were very different. We went to dinner. We went to the movies. And then we went to our separate homes. We knew I was in my waning days in Jockeys for Him, and neither of us could cope with the notion that our passion might not survive my transition. My castration. My rebirth.

  *

  PART II

  NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

  All Things Considered

  Tuesday, September 25

  CARLY BANKS: Stevens says she honestly didn't know whether Allison Banks would accompany her to Colorado.

  DANA STEVENS: Really, I didn't. But I hoped she would. I wasn't afraid of the surgery--I was actually looking forward to it. But I wasn't sure I could bear being alone. I'd spent so much of my life as a male that way that I wasn't sure what I would do if I woke up as a woman and my world was as empty as ever.

  Chapter 11.

  carly

  "GENDER MATTERS," DANA ONCE TOLD ME. "SEXUAL orientation doesn't."

  And while that mantra makes sense to me now, the bombshells my mom dropped on me the night I came home from college had left me shaken. The fact that I thought Dana was a pretty good-looking woman Sunday afternoon didn't help. He'd come over for brunch, and I wasn't honestly sure what to expect, but I certainly hadn't anticipated a tall, attractive woman in jeans and boots and a sweater.

  Dana was wearing more makeup than my mom wore, perhaps, but this was still no Cockney aunt from a Monty Python sketch.

  Apparently, he hadn't always looked so good in women's clothes. The first time my mom had seen Dana in drag, she said there was no way he could have passed for a woman. This was despite their decision to meet in some dive on Colchester Avenue with rotten lighting. By the time I came home from college, however, my mom had had six or seven weeks to whip him into shape. They spent whole afternoons at the big-and-tall-girl shops in the strip malls outside of Burlington when my mom was done teaching for the day, and once they went to some big-and-tall-girl factory outlet near Montreal.

  Dana was in heaven: racks and racks of dresses just his size.

  I wasn't sure what to say when he arrived early Sunday afternoon, despite having lain in bed most of that morning trying to figure it out. Fortunately, Dana made it easy for me.

  "It's my hair," he said, hanging his leather pocketbook along with his jacket on the coatrack just inside the front hall. "That's what's different. I've let it grow out." And then he hugged me, and I smelled his perfume.

  It was only the three of us that afternoon, so my mom was probably more comfortable with Dana physically than she would have been had there been other people with us. Nevertheless, I was still struck by the way they touched each other. After he handed her a big wooden salad bowl he'd gotten down from a cabinet high above the oven, Dana swirled his hand on her back, like her back was a window he was washing. I saw my mom squeeze his fingers after she'd given him the corkscrew for a bottle of wine. And they must have kissed each other at least three or four times.

  Once, I saw Dana kiss the tips of my mother's fingers where she had bitten the nails down to the cuticles and the skin was ragged and raw.

  My mom, I knew from experience, wouldn't have been that physical with a regular boyfriend in front of me. Dana, of course, wasn't a regular boyfriend: He had some of the advantages of one, such as the height to get down the salad bowl without needing a stool, and a lifetime of pulling corks from bottles of wine. But he was softer than a man, and he moved more gracefully through a room. His jeans may have been androgynous, but his blouse and his sweater were very delicate. Once or twice when he moved quickly in the kitchen and his cardigan flared behind him like wings, he reminded me of a dancer.

  And when my mom and he touched, it was like they'd been friends since childhood: just a pair of women who'd played tea party together at four and Barbies at five, now putting together a brunch on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Two women who'd been pals forever.

  When we sat down to eat, the two of them were so busy asking me about college and the film I was making at the battery factory that for long periods of time I completely forgot the strangeness that loomed before the two of them. I complained about my roommate, my lack of sleep, and about the way so many kids at the college were from cities and suburbs and couldn't cope with rural Vermont.

  I could have been talking to my mom and her friend Molly Cochran. In some ways, I could have been talking to Dad and Patricia.

  By the time Dana left late that afternoon, I was actually more comfortable with the notion that Dana the Transsexual was going to move in than I'd been a few days earlier with the idea that Dana the Man was going to live with us. It wouldn't, I realized, feel like my mom's male lover was in the house when I'd wake up in the morning--my hair a rat's nest, my breath poison gas. Rather, it would seem like her roommate from college was there. Maybe a friend from childhood had arrived. Perhaps some female cousin she hadn't seen in years, but with whom she had once been very close, was going to stay with us awhile.

  I understood something sexual would be going on when they disappeared into my mom's bedroom at night, the door closed when I was home, perhaps open wide when I was at college or at Dad's. But that no longer mattered--or, at least, it mattered less. When my mind neared the notion of my mom and Dana in the same queen-size bed, inevitably it would latch onto the realization as well that Dana was neither a female cousin nor a lesbian lover. At least not yet. And something about the whole equation would then make me shudder.

  Mostly, however, I was reassured. I was fine. I'd watched Dana, and a big part of me had concluded that he wasn't completely insane. Maybe, on some level that mattered more than most, he really was a woman.

  My father tried to put up a good front, but let's be real: His life was a natural disaster. At least it must have seemed that way to him, whenever he looked at the two adult women in his life. Patricia, it was clear even to me, wasn't wild about the idea of seeing a therapist: She thought it was only postponing the inevitable. And my mom, a woman he'd once been married to, was about to start living with--in his eyes--a man who wore makeup.

  I'm no
t sure what he was fearing more as winter approached: the idea that Patricia would leave him and he'd be seen by the world as a two-time loser, or the fact that his first wife was involved with a transsexual.

  The irony, of course, is that a big reason why Patricia was so unhappy was that she believed my dad was still in love with my mom. Despite the fact that they'd been divorced for over a decade, Patricia could see clearly that fall that my dad was still thinking about his "Allie" a good deal more than was wise for him or her or, no doubt, even my mom.

  I stayed there Monday and Tuesday when I came home from college, and while the two of them were civil at breakfast and dinner, both nights they fought. Neither one yelled--no one in my family is a real screamer--but I could hear them hissing at each other in their bedroom while I tried to read in my bed.

  "I don't know why you'd think that," my father insisted. "Do I talk about her? No. Do we have lunch? No. Do I even see her now that Carly's in college? No."

  "And it's killing you."

  "Killing me? Hardly."

  "You drove past her house last week."

  "I just wanted to see if her creepy boyfriend was there. I find it unfathomable that they're back together."

  "That's exactly what I'm talking about!"

  "We're still friends. It's only natural to care about what she does with her life."

  "There are degrees, Will. There are degrees."

  "And she's Carly's mom. I have to think about her, too."

  "Carly's in college, for God's sake. She's not some impressionable preschooler."

  By the time I got up Tuesday morning, Patricia had already left for her office, but my dad was still home. He was finishing the first section of the newspaper while listening to Bob Edwards interview a Peruvian soccer star on Morning Edition.

  "Did you hear us last night?" he asked.

  "Hear what?"

  He folded the newspaper into a small rectangle and smiled: "Yeah, right."

  I shrugged.

  "You know, I didn't tell you about Dana this fall because I figured your mother would have ended the relationship long before you came home from college. I'm sorry. I should have told you."

  I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down with him. "Why?"

  "Why what?"

  "Why should you have told me?"

  "So it wouldn't have been such a shock."

  "I can deal."

  He stretched his legs under the kitchen table and rested his hands in his lap. "All right, then: What do you think of Dana?"

  It was eight in the morning, a pretty early hour in the day for me that semester. I considered taking the easy way out and being completely noncommittal and vague. And my dad seemed so pathetic that fall that I seriously considered the uncommunicative-teenager route out of sympathy. A grunt would probably have sufficed.

  But that didn't seem fair to Dana, and so I answered with what I thought was a compromise. "Well, she's a little weird and I have my doubts. But I like her. I like her a lot."

  "She? Her?"

  I realized instantly that I'd chosen exactly the wrong pronouns for my dad. "I guess I could call Dana a him. But I know that's not what she wants."

  My dad nodded. "You're very diplomatic. But I think there's a biological imperative here that transcends preference."

  "You don't think Dana could be a woman in a man's body?"

  "I think Dana could believe such a thing. I think he could believe it with all his heart. But Dana is no more a woman than I'm an NFL linebacker. I could go around all day long in a New England Patriots jersey, but I still wouldn't be six and a half feet tall, I still wouldn't be two hundred and eighty pounds of rock-hard muscle. I still couldn't tackle an NFL running back if my life depended upon it."

  "It's not exactly the same thing."

  "Maybe not. But Dana's delusions will still affect your mom's life. That's my concern. I don't care what Dana does. Really, I don't. I only care if his actions take a toll on your mother."

  "I wouldn't worry so much about Mom. She'll be okay."

  "You sound like your stepmother."

  "Well, she's right."

  "I don't think either of you realize what people will say. What people already are saying."

  "About Mom and Dana?"

  "She's a schoolteacher, honey. She's a schoolteacher in a little village in rural Vermont. This isn't West Hollywood. It isn't even Bennington College."

  "They'd do fine there," I agreed.

  "People lose their jobs over this sort of thing. They lose their friends. Their families. They lose everything," he said, shaking his head as he spoke.

  That night, my dad and Patricia took up exactly where they had left off on Monday, but they were more conscious of my presence down the hall this time, and so they spoke much more softly. Nevertheless, I still heard select words and phrases, and sometimes I'd overhear a whole sentence.

  "You're in love with her, admit it," Patricia said at one point, and it sounded as if she was on the verge of tears. Then, a little while later, she said, "I won't quiet down. It's not fair, and you know it. It's not fair and I shouldn't have to take it."

  The next morning, my dad and Patricia had both left for work by the time I awoke, and I wouldn't see them again until Friday night. I knew they were seeing their couples counselor during lunch that day, and my hope was that the therapist would find a way to reestablish peace in our time. I wasn't confident, but even a nineteen-year-old hates to see parents fight.

  Chapter 12.

  will

  PATRICIA AND I WENT SKIING EVERY SATURDAY AT the Snow Bowl that December, and not simply because Patricia had purchased a new pair of skis. We donned our goggles and parkas because our therapist had encouraged us to do more things together.

  Ironically, at the Snow Bowl I found myself focused even more on Allie and Dana, despite the fact that Allie had never once slipped either of her little feet into the cavernous plastic shell of a ski boot, or looked down from a chair lift and watched her skis bounce like airplane wings in a bumpy sky.

  But, I learned, I was always going to associate the Snow Bowl with Allie. It was simple transitivity: I was on the ski team at Middlebury and we practiced at the Snow Bowl, and so the Snow Bowl would always remind me of college. College, in turn, would connect me with Allie.

  There were other reasons, too, of course. We all have moments when we think we're at our best, and when we like ourselves just a little too much. Many of my moments like that occurred those winters when I was a very young man, and I'd squeeze in a dozen runs--a dozen runs minimum--a day, and then I'd return to Allie's dorm room, as attentive as a prodigal lover. I'd feel badly that I'd deserted her, and I'd be unfailingly attentive and present.

  At least I think I was present.

  Present is one of those words that came up a lot when Patricia and I were in counseling. Apparently, I'm not always as present as I think I am. I'm not exactly absent--even those months when Dana and Allie were becoming an item, I wasn't always alone in my car at the edge of the airport--but it seems I don't always listen.

  "What I think Patricia is saying," our therapist constantly said, "is that you hear her. But you're not listening to her. Do you see the difference?"

  Certainly I did. Our counselor was a woman about a decade our senior, who was still very attractive. Unfortunately, she took great pride in what she called "active listening," which meant two things. First of all, it meant she was always nodding her head when either Patricia or I spoke, as if she were one of those wooden mascot dolls with a bobbing noggin you buy at the ballpark. You couldn't stare back at her without getting seasick.

  Second, it meant that any problems Patricia and I had could be reduced, in her opinion, to my inability to pay attention to what my wife really was saying. Patricia could have had an affair with the seventeen-year-old son of a client--which she most assuredly did not--and in the eyes of our therapist it would have been because I wasn't listening.

  Of course, it's easy to be catty abou
t the counselor now. Even then, however, I think I understood she was onto something, if only because of those Saturdays Patricia and I spent together on the ski slopes. I'd recall college and my first years with Allie, and I'd remember how, once, I probably had been a better listener.

  One Saturday that winter, a couple of weeks before Christmas, I was waiting for Patricia at the bottom of the mountain and watching the other skiers motor downhill. I found myself ogling a slim young woman in navy blue ski pants. I noticed her midway down her final descent toward the base lodge, and I could see that she had terrific form. Then she abruptly cut her skis into the powder and came to a stop about twenty yards distant. She was chatting with another woman, facing away from me as she pulled off her goggles and her headband. Her parka was yellow and only fell to her waist, which meant I stared for a long moment at her rear.